Add a human to the market-product equation

Recently, I was talking to a company that helps employers gather feedback from their in-the-field workforce in order to boost employee retention. And while they have a ton of customers fielding surveys, the product folks were concerned that managers don’t actually seem to be looking at the feedback dashboard.

My suggestion was to use a Max Headroom: take a few customers and do away with the dashboard entirely, instead having one of the product managers meet with them weekly to deliver the feedback. That way, the SaaS company could eliminate the dashboard itself as a variable and focus on the core behavior of managers responding to employees.

The tactic is named after a character from the 80s played by an actor in prosthetics but billed as computer-generated; the goal is to have a human frontend with a computing backend. And it is similar to another testing methodology, the Mechanical Turk, where the frontend is computing but the backend is actually human.

When I suggest this to folks, the objection is usually that humans aren’t scalable. Which isn’t entirely true; for many SaaS companies, a bit of quick math shows that you can have a CS person take quite a lot of meetings and still be profitable. 

But it also doesn’t matter. The point of a Max Headroom isn’t to find a scalable business model; it is to reduce the inhibiting pressures of a behavior to as near zero as possible. A meeting to go through the dashboard together doesn’t quite accomplish that; there are still plenty of inhibiting pressures like time, mental energy, etc. But it is meaningfully easier than trying to interpret and action a dashboard on your own.

The much larger, unspoken concern is: what if that doesn’t work? What if, even with human-delivered feedback, managers are still unwilling to do what it takes to retain employees?

And the sad answer might be that it is time to pivot. If you try a Max Headroom and your target audience still doesn’t do the behavior, even with inhibiting pressure reduced in unsustainable ways, then you may need to address your underlying behavioral statement.

There are exceptions where adding a human increases friction, like calling a taxi company instead of using the Uber app. But that is more typical in consumer products and less in SaaS, where value is usually produced by removing the cost of having a human do something.

Max Headroom tests are underutilized in product creation, because of the bias toward seemingly-scalable software as the solution to everything. But in an AI era, where we need to better decouple backends and frontends, they are more important than ever. Because if a human reading your AI’s script isn’t useful, your AI probably isn’t either.